The New Pac Something Or Other

The most interesting truth to come out of the Pac-10′s Lost Rumor Weekend is the way the universoity presidents got out of the way and let commissioner Larry Scott plot the conference’s future. Not that, given the times, Scott is doing anything other than keeping up with the Megajoneses, but it means that the conference can no longer hide behind the “the presidents decide” fiction.

The Pac-10 wants to be a 16-team, or even a 22-team player in a college sports landscape that is shrinking down to a precious few players, and the announcement that Scott could work the best deal he thought he could get means that the presidents just want to see the check. You know, like the SEC, ACC, Big 10, Big East and Big 12 presidents. No more of this holier-than-thou stance. They’re clients, nothing more.

Proof? They’re going to negotiate with the Texas legislature to deal with the Baylor vs. Colorado wrangle. It doesn’t get more pragmatic than that.

This is the job they hired Scott to do for them, to be sure, and Scott may be on the verge of delivering a bigger hit than any of them could have imagined. In other words, he’s done the job he was brought on to do.

But there can be no more fictions about who runs the conference, or who can be invited or kept out. If Scott likes BYU, BYU is in, amd never mind the reasons why it would be out. If he likes UNLV, then Vegas is in. As long as the math works, in these difficult financial times for universities, the strange polyglot BigPac XXII and its seemingly incompatible mission statements can be boiled down to one.

“We’re all getting paid.”

We mention this only so that the oft-held illusion that the Pac-10 fancied itself as the Ivy League of the West, which is now finished. The schools still have their individual standards, most of which are perfectly fine to admirable, but as a conference, they are just like the SEC and ACC and Bigs East, 12 and 10 and all the conferences their fans once mocked as athletic factories.